Monday, June 27, 2011

A lot has happened since I posted my Cranky Pants Alert - Here Be Dragons this morning.

One was the response from my husband who asked, "I don't understand why you didn't exhaust normal channels such as an email and a telephone call before you took to Twitter. Why would you do that?"

I have tried on many occasions to explain Twitter, but this is a man who has just begun to fully understand blogging and thinks Facebook and Twitter are ridiculous. So, I didn't attempt to explain Flipboard.

My reasoning - Flipboard is an application that lives in the exclusive digital world of the iPad. It's content is created from those blogs I select, as well as the ridiculous Twitter and Facebook. They are the consummate virtual business. So I decided to get their attention virtually.

An aside - I LOVE Twitter; this micro-blogging platform surpasses all my expectations of what is possible in the digital world. That was until Flipboard found a way to neatly package and magazine display Tweets.

So, I Tweeted my Here Be Dragons rant and it was picked up by several other people on Twitter and eventually seen by Flipboard. They responded immediately. So obviously my reasoning and their customer service worked, as you can see below.

Then the pièce de résistance. Flipboard actually looked at the images appearing in the genealogy section and I got this response.

So fellow genealogists, social media works. And someone has to protect our genealogy.

posts of note by the footnoteMaven

4 Comments:

We must be sisters from another mother or something. I'm not one to dilly dally around when it comes to taking action. Bad images need to be nipped in the bud ASAP for so many reasons. My only complaint is that I don't have a iPad and so can't use that app. Social media DOES work, and today we saw it in action again. Good job fM!!

Thanks for the kind words, I'm happy to help. Sorry you had to see the inappropriate content. The way Flipboard expands all links and images is a great thing, until confronted with something like this.

I did escalate this issue to the team. We have an ongoing topic about "Not Safe For Work" content and we are working on improving this aspect of the service. With our next update, we will be adding the ability to report inappropriate images, which will flag it for removal from our servers, and it will also immediately remove the image from your feed. This is coming very soon.

In the meantime, you can also Hide posts from certain users. Just tap on the post (I know, not ideal, but you can turn your iPad so you don't have to look directly at the images) and tap on the name / avatar of the user and select Hide. You won't see any more posts from this account. This may help you enjoy your #genealogy feed in the short term.

Thank you again for bringing this to our attention, and for helping police this feed on Twitter. Report it all as spam, like you've been doing. It will help Twitter, which also helps us. :)